Word: rko
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...legend goes something like that--he was adrift in a strained family. His opera-loving mother died when he was nine, his suavely alcoholic father three years later. Welles would memorialize his mother in Kane and find father-sponsors in his prep-school principal, Broadway's John Houseman, RKO's George Schaefer. He would also make himself a father figure, at 20 playing men of 80. From early days, then, Welles was one wily orphan. Who was left to love him? Only the rest of the world...
...year later, Welles arrived in Hollywood with a fussy, je-suis-l'artiste beard and an RKO contract giving him total control over his films. To an industry in robust middle age, Welles was a pampered brat. They called him Little Orson Annie, the Christ Child. One local wit said, "There, but for the grace of God, goes...
Welles, thrilled by Mankiewicz's idea for a Hearst film, was also desperate. His first RKO project--Heart of Darkness, which would be told with a subjective camera and would star Welles as Marlow and Kurtz--was deemed too pricey. Now, with Mank's unbilled help (the deal specified no screen credit for his script), Welles hoped to turn a jolly plutocrat into a tragic figure, swathe the San Simeon Sun King in the menacing shadows of movie melodrama. Kane would be Welles' Hearst of Darkness...
...they do provide us with an utter escape from this world of "Reservoir Dogs" and "Natural Born Killers" through 1930s Hollywood grace, glamour and fancy footwork. They do remind us of an era that perhaps never even existed, save in a small RKO studio in the age of the truly silver screen...
Brought up in Jamestown, New York, by a fun-loving mother and a dismissive stepfather, Ball headed to Manhattan in 1926 to pursue show business. Although she was not considered beautiful, she worked as a fashion model and an awkward chorus girl before winning a contract with RKO studios in Los Angeles...